Trump Has Promised to Build More Ships. He May Deport the Workers Who Help Make Them.

In the meantime, the industry is relying on immigrants for a range of shipyard duties, with many working jobs similar to those on a construction site, including on cleanup crews and as welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future immigration crackdown or restrictions on legal immigration, including limits on asylum or temporary protected status programs, could cause disruptions that would further harm their capacity for production.

Ron Wille, the president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said that his company was “clawing” for workers. And Peter Duclos, the president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Massachusetts, said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he was already having trouble holding onto valuable workers and finding more.

There is no publicly available data that shows how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Wille and Duclos said that they do not employ undocumented workers, and industry experts say undocumented workers are unlikely to be working on projects requiring security clearances. However, reporting by ProPublica last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts have used such workers. That reporting focused on a major Louisiana shipyard run by a company called Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants have often been hired through third-party subcontractors.

The story reported on a young undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who was helping build an $89 million U.S. government ship for tracking hurricanes. When he died on the job after working at Thoma-Sea for two years, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son.

ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, had made tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates. However, if Trump’s last time in office is any guide, the shipbuilding industry wouldn’t be exempted from any future crackdown. One of the final workplace raids under Trump’s first administration was conducted at an even larger shipbuilder in Louisiana called Bollinger.

In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport shipyard, according to a story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement refused to provide information on the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, that yard produces U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the workers arrested were sent to an ICE detention center and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to the news report.

Bollinger denied any wrongdoing following the raid. Four years later, there’s no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives faced any charges in connection to it. Meanwhile, federal electoral records show that the company’s executives donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials last year, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

President Joe Biden’s administration ended workplace raids like the one at Bollinger, saying that it would instead focus on “unscrupulous employers.” Department of Homeland Security officials did not answer questions or provide data on how many employers had been prosecuted since then. However, Trump’s designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, has signaled that the incoming administration will return to carrying out the raids. When asked how the second Trump administration will increase shipbuilding while limiting immigration, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation promises, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.”

A few days after Trump won the election, a group of undocumented shipyard welders leaving a Hispanic grocery store near the port in Houma, Louisiana, expressed a dim view when asked what they thought lay ahead. One man, who declined to provide his name, broke into a nervous laugh and blurted, “Well, we could be deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who’d been working in the U.S. for about two years, also declined to give his name but said he worried about losing the life he’d managed to build in this country.

“When they grab you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.”

Nicole Foy is ProPublica’s Ancil Payne Fellow, reporting on immigration and labor. This story was originally published by ProPublica.